Deacon Robert Winn bears a scar above his left eye from a wound he sustained after a march for equal voting rights erupted into police violence in Selma, Ala., on “Bloody Sunday” five decades ago.

Winn, who chairs the political action committee of the NAACP San Fernando Valley Chapter, was among the more than 500 peaceful demonstrators who marched six blocks from a Selma church to the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965, when they were met by state troopers on horseback wielding billy clubs and tear gas.

The Mission Hills resident returned to his native Alabama last week to join tens of thousands of people for the weekend commemoration of the 50th anniversary of that historic televised march, which sent dozens of protesters to the hospital and served as a catalyst for the passage of the Voting Rights Act later that year.

“If you were on the bridge 50 years ago, there’s no way you could erase that from your memory,” Winn, 70, who also leads the San Fernando Valley African-American Leadership Organization, said Sunday by phone from Alabama. “Whether you were hurting or running for your life, there’s no way you could forget it.”

Winn recalled white bystanders heckling and threatening them as they marched toward the Edmund Pettus Bridge that day. On Saturday, however, he was delighted to see throngs of people from a variety of backgrounds and political affiliations — as he has seen at many protests that followed Bloody Sunday — commemorating the occasion together.

“We had whites, Asians, blacks, Hispanics, every ethnicity there,” he said. “It was such a joy to see the mix of ethnicities, gathering there to commemorate those 50 years. …That was so important to me because I think we are a country of Americans, not African-Americans, white Americans, Asians or Hispanics or native Americans.”

Obeying his teacher

In the spring of 1965, Winn was living in Southern California and working for a supermarket in Altadena when he got a call from his former high school music teacher, Lewis Black, in Greensboro, Ala. His teacher, a civil rights activist, told him that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was organizing a march from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights and that Winn needed to return to Alabama to take part. The Selma march was organized in response to the fatal shooting of protester and church Deacon Jimmie Lee Jackson by an Alabama state trooper in Marion, he said.

Winn didn’t consider himself an activist at the time — just “obeying my music teacher” whom he greatly respected — when he hopped a Greyhound bus to Alabama. He wasn’t planning to march all the way to Montgomery due to his job in Southern California, he said, but hoped to march for a couple of days. However, everyone’s plans were cut short.

On March 7, 1965, Winn and others gathered at Brown Chapel in Selma, ate some snacks and then started walking toward the bridge, he said.

“We didn’t know we were going to meet the resistance that we met — at least I didn’t,” Winn said. “When I saw the state troopers lined up across the bridge to block us, I knew it wasn’t good.”

The scene from the 2014 film “Selma” accurately portrayed the chaos of that day, he said, with protesters getting trampled and being hit brutally with batons, he said. Winn said he tried his best to shield some of the older marchers from the blows. He sustained a cut above his left eye during the chaos though he’s not sure how.

“I was bleeding but I wasn’t hurt as bad as many of the others that were hurt,” he said.

Despite the events of Bloody Sunday and the discrimination he faced growing up in Alabama, Winn said he did not become bitter, only better.

“Because I grew up in the segregated Jim Crow South, I grew up under those roles — colored fountain, white fountain — and there’s nothing that society or the world can throw at me that I can’t handle because of growing up in that type of atmosphere,” he said. “Absolutely nothing.”

Movement ‘not dead’

In addition to hearing President Barack Obama and Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., who helped lead the 1965 march and was seriously injured that day, Winn was particularly pleased to see some Republican leaders, including former President George W. Bush and his family, this past weekend.

The former U.S. Army veteran, who served in Korea during the Vietnam War era, was also thrilled to see so many young faces in the crowd, which signified to him that the movement for justice and equality “is not dead.” Many of them walked up to Winn, a father of six and grandfather of 12 who wore a button identifying himself as a Bloody Sunday participant, to thank him for his actions on that day, he said.

“I thanked them for their concern, but I said, ‘You know what? The work is not done because as you know, the (Voting) Rights Act of 1965 has been weakened,’” Winn said, referring to a 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision that ended a requirement that certain states with a history of discrimination get federal clearance before changing voter laws. “They have the opportunity to restore it.”

That message was highlighted on Saturday by Obama, who urged Congress to restore the law this year.

And while the nation has certainly had its setbacks, Winn said he feels good about the progress the country has made since he first tried to cross that bridge five decades ago.

“We’ve come a mighty long way from the Jim Crow South that I grew up in,” he said.

Brenda Gazzar is a multilingual multimedia reporter who has worked for a variety of news outlets in California and in the Middle East since 2000. She has covered a range of issues, including breaking news, immigration, law and order, race, religion and gender issues, politics, human interest stories and education. Besides the Los Angeles Daily News and its sister papers, her work has been published by Reuters, the Denver Post, Ms. Magazine, the Jerusalem Post, USA Today, the Christian Science Monitor, the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, The Cairo Times and others. Brenda speaks Spanish, Hebrew and intermediate Arabic and is the recipient of national, state and regional awards, including a National Headliners Award and one from the Associated Press News Executives' Council. She holds a dual master's degree in Communications/Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.